The Moon has long fascinated humankind, inspiring countless myths, stories, and scientific inquiries. Our understanding of the Moon has shifted gears in recent years owing to several outer space missions that explored geology, surface, and, mineral resources. The idea of building a lunar economy has existed for some time now. To make it a reality, scientists will have to set up a communication and navigation infrastructure with a standardized way to determine time.
NASA is currently in the early stages of developing
“LunaNet is a framework of mutually agreed-upon standards, protocols, and interface requirements allowing future lunar missions to work together, conceptually similar to what we did on Earth for joint use of GPS and Galileo,”
LunaNet: Enhancing Connectivity and Empowering Missions at the Moon
“As NASA establishes a sustained lunar presence on the Moon, creating a robust infrastructure becomes increasingly important. The LunaNet communications and navigation architecture is extensible and flexible,”
He further explains how LunaNet will provide three types of services: networking, position, timing and navigation, and science utilization. Users, both human and robotic, will experience network functionality similar to that experienced on Earth.
The ESA(European Space Agency) opened an
What is ESA’s Moonlight initiative?
“Many of the proposed lunar missions will require reliable navigation and telecommunication capabilities. Building these capabilities independently would be inefficient and costly due to complex, recurrent developments,” ESA’s announcement blog post titled “Lunar Economy Applications”
Not only ESA, but NASA has also adopted public-private models for providing space services, such as
NASA has invested $1.2 billion in
Of the total investment in space over the last decade, which
The US-based space agency anticipates that the lunar network will expand along with the increase in activity on and around the Moon. It projects that with the establishment of the Lunar Gateway, its newly planned lunar space station, the Moon will require approximately 210 megabits per second and 4.6 terabytes per day, as stated in a
"In 2021 there were 13 landers, orbiters, and rovers on and around the Moon," Kelly Larson, CEO of Aquarian Space,
NASA is devising a plan to enhance its services by launching lunar satellites that will interconnect with each other and eventually link back to the communication infrastructure on Earth.
Private companies, including Aquarian Space and Nokia, are contributing to the development of lunar internet infrastructure. Aquarian Space
Accurate navigation depends majorly on precise timekeeping as it is crucial in determining the exact location of a
Currently, every new expedition to the Moon is conducted on Earth's timeline, with the assistance of deep space antennas to ensure that the spacecraft's clocks are aligned with terrestrial time and to enable communication between the spacecraft and Earth. However, this approach will not be viable in the future lunar environment.
There are over
Considering this, space agencies have initiated discussions on how to measure time on the Moon. These discussions began with a meeting at ESA's ESTEC technology center in the Netherlands in November of last year.
"During this meeting at ESTEC, we agreed on the importance and urgency of defining a common lunar reference time, which is internationally accepted and towards which all lunar systems and users may refer to. A joint international effort is now being launched towards achieving this,”
“Timekeeping and time distribution are essential for navigation performance and for maintaining synchronization across multiple assets. Time knowledge significantly impacts observation accuracy. Inaccuracies and differences among sources used in measurement time-tagging impart offsets relative to the true orbit location,” states the conference paper.
Observations commonly used in radio and optometric technologies include one-way and two-way range and Doppler measurements. These observations heavily rely on precise time-stamping, which must be referenced to a standardized time scale such as International Atomic Time (TAI).
Establishing a universal lunar time presents a unique challenge as clocks on Earth and the Moon operate at different speeds due to the varying gravitational fields. As such, the form that an official lunar time would take is not clear. One possibility is that lunar time could be based on a clock system that is designed to synchronize with Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Alternatively, lunar time could be entirely independent of Earth time, resulting in the creation of a unique time system specifically designed for the Moon.
According to
Other than technical standpoints, geopolitics will play a major role in building the lunar economy. The entity that shapes the internet infrastructure on the Moon will wield significant influence, as it will have the authority to establish guidelines for how network providers collaborate and allocate lunar web addresses.
Despite the U.S.'s efforts to bring other nations and space agencies into alignment with its
For effective collaboration, the international community must agree upon a shared "selenocentric reference frame," similar to the International Terrestrial Reference Frame used on Earth, which allows for accurate measurement of precise distances between points across the Moon. Such customized reference frames are crucial components of modern GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite Systems).
Once the scientists are able to move past the challenges, the construction of